Have you noticed the awkward situation with enums in $cxx? They are missing basic reflective features, such as string conversions. You are forced to put them through big `switch` statements and write duplicate enum names. It's a maintenance nightmare. $be is a short header file that gives you rich, reflective enums, with the nicest syntax yet seen. Just include it, and you are ready to go. You get scoped, sized, printable, iterable enums that support initializers and still play nice with `switch` case checking!

$cxx11

#include <iostream>
#include <enum.h>

ENUM(Channel, int,
     Red = 1, Green, Blue)

int main()
{
  Channel c = Channel::Red;
  std::cout << c._to_string();

  for (Channel c : Channel::_values())
    std::cout << c._to_string();

  switch (c) {
    case Channel::Red:
      return c._to_integral();
    case Channel::Green: return 15;
    case Channel::Blue:  return 42;
  }
}

constexpr Channel c =
  Channel::_from_string("Blue");

$cxx98

#include <iostream>
#include <enum.h>

ENUM(Channel, int,
     Red = 1, Green, Blue)

int main()
{
  Channel c = Channel::Red;
  std::cout << c._to_string();

  for (size_t i = 0;
       i < Channel::_size; ++i) {

    c = Channel::_values()[i];
    std::cout << c._to_string();
  }

  switch (c) {
    case Channel::Red:
      return c._to_integral();
    case Channel::Green: return 15;
    case Channel::Blue:  return 42;
  }
}
To install, simply download enum.h and add it to your project. That's all. The library is header-only and has no dependencies. It is published under the BSD license, so you can do pretty much anything you want with it. --- Better Enums is under active development and will always be supported. Follow the project on [GitHub]($repo) for updates. ---

Tutorials

    $tutorial_toc

Advanced demos

Reference

%% title = Clean reflective enums for C++